Tag: Job Board

Is Search Engine Optimization important for advertising your jobs on the job boards? Should you optimize every single job post? Isn’t optimization of job post on a job board actually only ‘Keyword Stuffing’, since you do not control any other page element?

Short answer:

Yes SEO is extremely important when publishing a job on a job board. Yes, you can only play with text, s0 make sure you do it well!

Why SEO-in a individual job post?

It will attract searches composed of number of words (‘Long Tail Search’) that describe the desired position. In general a job seeker that searches for ‘Jobs’ is on average of less ‘Quality Applicant’ than someone searching for ‘IT Project Manager Dublin South’.

By optimising the job specification for the search engines – the quality of the applicants raise dramatically. I have done tests with a number of my clients in publishing the two versions of the same role. One the way they would ‘Normally’ write it and the other highly optimised for the most used search words combined in search phrases constructed from:

Job location

Job title or role name

Job Location

Skills required or technologies used

Qualifications required or desired

The result is that the majority of candidates interviewed came from a version of the job advertised that was optimised for the search engines. The majority of the applications would tend to come from a day to 3 – 4 days after the publishing of the role. The overall quality of the applications would tend to go down as times goes by after that.

Monster is all about their new site. That isn’t actaully available. And will not be available this year. That does not stop them advertising it for the last couple of months. They started sounding a bit like Microsoft advertising their Vista. A lot of hipe, for a long, long time, but the result is…

Well let’s give Monster a chance to actaully show it to us. They promised it in Januarry next year (how crazy do you have to be to release teh new version of the job site in the month when job boards have the most traffic? If someting goes wrong, and things allways go wrong with the new releases, do you really need to show it to the most of visitors? :)

Well I guess it was a marketing driven decission, as Monsters decisions allways are, as oposed to the someones who knows how to run the operations.

Releasing a new jobs site in the year 2009, I would consider to be a failure if it does not have an element of the social networking. Is Monster smart and brave enough to bring the social networking in online recruitment on a large scale, as oposed to what LinkedIN is trying to do? Let’s wait and see ….

Untill then we will just be getting thoise emails and PDF’s titled Take a sneak peek at the new Monster or simmilar…

A few more admin pages in the back end of the job site and that is all you really need to get going. Later on you might ad a page for Company Profiles, Quotes, or similar Jada-jada required for the search engine optimization purposes. You might disguise it under eh title Career Resources, or something sounding equally smart.

Any web development company can do it fairly quickly, and if you stick to those basics, it will not cost you an arm end leg. Outsourcing the development to India will save you quite some money as well. And this is the reason we had more than 20 new job sites in Ireland launched in the same year 2007. Imagine 20 new job sites in the market that to anyone in the industry seams overcrowded.

There is only one problem with the job sites, and that is that they are more often than not built so that they store the CV’s of the candidates. This enables the job board owners to sell access to the CV databases. Holding onto CVs online requires a tough security, and if you have been cutting corners while developing your web site, it might not be there. The end results are that job hunters private data gets exposed. Sometimes their application history and sometimes even the full CVs find their way to the web.

Yes we did contact Karl to let him know and he pached the security hole quickly.

Year 2008 started funny for the Job Boards in Ireland. Job boards started understanding that the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the core of their business.

The reason the big job boards understood the y need to invest in SEO is because the year 2007 was the year where a largest number of the niche small job boards appeared in a single year. More than 20 new job boards requested to be included in the multiple job posting software eRecruit.ie in the year 2007 only! Those small niche web sites are in most cases industry specific, and usually have some link with some existing organisation or publication, or are just set up by someone who does know the industry. Knowing the industry helps in organising and running the small niche job board, so more often than not the niche job sites have some success as well. That hurts the job big boards, and it hurts them badly! So the national job boards decided to fight back in 2008, and to do so they are looking for the SEO people.

“Please do not apply if you have not got a good solid knowledge of the internet.”

That clearly shows they know what they are looking for!

Recruit Ireland…. nothing? About 20 different agencies have a job that appears in the search result for the word SEO, but no SEO jobs from the job site itself. Do they not need a SEO staff like the rest of the ob boards? Do they not trust the web site to deliver the candidate and have advertised in their papers?

Monster have a new site with a bit strange front page, and again they are not looking for a SEO specialist in Ireland. In all fairness, their SEO needs are probably managed from the head office in the US.

Job Aggregators have their fair share of success and problems. As far I can remember the first one in the Irish market was www.IrelandJobs.ie. It was displaying jobs from about 5 to 7 job boards that existed in Ireland back in 2002 -2003. Job boards went ballistic!!! Every single one of them turned aggressive, and word ‘court’ found its place in every single sentence they produced. It wasn’t funny. Later the service was actually reversed. So as opposed to take the jobs from the job boards we made a Multiple Job Posting service www.eRecruit.ie, so as opposed to take jobs to job boards, all of the sudden we started feeding the recruiters jobs to the job boards. Now we are all ‘Partners’ and we get nice boxes of chocolates and stuff for Christmas from them (Except one!!!).

A number of jobs aggregators have been launched since in the Irish jobs market. Actually about one a year. You can see them stopping advertising in Google AdWords from a few months from the launch to about a year later. None of them invests in the search engine optimisation (SEO), therefore are dependent on the visitors traffic from the search engine marketing campaigns (SEM). Economically such a business model is not sustainable economically, and when the investment is spent, they tend to vanish from the job advertising scene in Ireland.